Support of products is generally a very expensive and time-consuming process. When customers experience problems with a product, the customers typically contact product support for assistance. In such scenarios, efficient query handling and response is essential to provide a quick response that is expected by the customers. Currently such product support services are highly labor-intensive and time-consuming because such customer support services are generally handled by trained personnel who receive the queries from the customers, have to understand the queries, search the product databases, and manually answer the customer's queries. This manual customer support service process can result in wasting human expertise for trivial tasks, which in turn can result in delayed response to the customers and increased cost to a provider of customer support services.
Generally, most of the queries received from customers tend to be repetitious and similar in fundamental characteristics. Such queries can be classified and responded to instantaneously through an automated system. The process becomes more complex when a company has a range of products and a huge customer base having product related problems that has diverse solutions. The process can get even more complex when the media through which the customers interact with customer support services is diverse, i.e., e-mail, internet, telephone, and letter. Further, the process can become even more complex when response to a query depends on the type of product, the attitude of the customer, and status of the client.
Current processes using automated customer support systems are mostly characterized by huge databases of domain specific keywords, built into the system, using search methods adopted to answer queries specifically through e-mails, and there has been very little effort to build an integrated system to account for various products, customer bases, diverse customer interactions, and the nature of the queries.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for an automated customer support system that can take into account various products, various customer bases, diverse customer interactions, and nature of the queries and respond automatically to customer queries at a low cost as expected by customers.